"Some books don't age, or age slowly. This book of poems was first offered more than two decades ago to a critic and scholar as a book about the Twentieth Century. He disliked it and called it mere "rant." Now, twenty-two or twenty-three years later, I am surprised very often by the topicality of many poems that Alicia Zukofsky wrote so quickly at the time. They are angry poems in many cases, some are tender, all are pensive, in this or that way." - Karen Wittstock